Books for Dark Political Times: Michael Copperman’s Library

Reader:  Michael Copperman
Location:  Eugene, Oregon
Collection Size:  Five hundred books
The one book I'd run back into a burning building to rescue:  I Have a Dream: The March on Washington by Emma Gelders Sterne
Favorite book from childhood:  James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
Guilty pleasure book:  Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein

My personal library is small. I live in a converted garage and rent out the rooms of my house, and I have boxes and boxes of books away in storage and in my office at the university. My awkward little secret is that I am often not much of a reader of contemporary fiction—I tend to read poetry as one consumes fuel, and keep those books thrown about the living room, where just now I am reading the collected work of Langston Hughes as if it might save my life. With everything else, I am immensely selective, and more likely when I am deep in work and process to reread something essential to me which speaks of mystery than I am to begin the latest NY Times bestseller. For instance, I have read Andre Dubus’s Dancing After Hours, five times, and would gladly begin it again. I have read the collected stories of Chekhov two or three times, and these days, every couple months I read his great short story “The Student,” an irreducible and indescribable little short about immanence, which in that story is the suggestion of imminence in the absence of wisdom, meaning, and God.

I keep the books which I am intending to read in a stack atop the rest on the right shelf on one side of the bed—books by friends or acquaintances, gifts, books which I feel I need to read or should have read. Sometimes books jump the queue that demand attention—on top now is a book by my great-grandmother, the writer Emma Gelders Sterne, I Have a Dream: The March on Washington which was published in 1965.

Recently I pulled that book from my father’s shelves of all Emma’s books as if drawn to it—to find a note from my father to me, his unborn son, five years before my birth, charging me with bearing on his grandmother’s legacy of writing, activism, compassion, and justice. As this is one of Emma’s books I did not read in my childhood, and speaks of a strength and solidarity and rising up I feel I may need to summon now, in these dark political times, I am excited to begin.

Atop the left shelf are books I’ve pulled from the shelves because I needed to read them as I work to complete an essay or my novel-in-progress—usually books which have been a long love of mine, or have particular resonance. So it is that Cesar Vallejo, translated by Roberty Bly and James Wright, sits atop that shelf. Vallejo, the music of my heart on big sad days of reckoning. So it is that Hamlet, has been set to the top, too, in this bitter winter, as has Willa Cather’s Five Stories, perhaps her least known work, but so large in lyric and retrospective force. I turn to these books as if to a holy book, a source—they do not directly instruct me, but their art and ethos are somewhere so near to what is in me as I work that they show me a way.

Michael Copperman is the author of Teacher, a memoir of the rural black public schools of the Mississippi Delta. He has taught writing to low-income, first-generation students of diverse background at the University of Oregon for the last decade. His prose has appeared in The Oxford American, The Sun, Creative Nonfiction, Salon, Gulf Coast, Guernica, Waxwing, and Copper Nickel, among other magazines, and has won awards and garnered fellowships from the Munster Literature Center, Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, Oregon Literary Arts, and the Oregon Arts Commission. Visit www.mikecopperman.com for more information about Michael and his book. 

My Library is an intimate look at personal book collections.  Readers are encouraged to send high-resolution photos of their home libraries or bookshelves, along with a description of particular shelving challenges, quirks in sorting (alphabetically? by color?), number of books in the collection, and particular titles which are in the To-Be-Read pile.  Email thequiveringpen@gmail.com for more information.

Comedy Trumps Tragedy: A conversation with Stuart Rojstaczer, author of The Mathematician's Shiva

"I’m overeducated and like to tell jokes."  That's how Stuart Rojstaczer begins the About Me page at his website.  That combination of brains and laughter provide the savory broth for his debut novel The Mathematician's Shiva, which hits bookstores at the beginning of September.  Described as "a comic, bittersweet tale of family evocative of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union and Everything Is Illuminated," The Mathematician's Shiva is about a ragtag group of academics who descend on Alexander “Sasha” Karnokovitch's house shortly after his mother Rachela ("the greatest female mathematician in history") passes away.  Rumor has it the notoriously eccentric Polish émigré has solved one of the most difficult problems in all of mathematics, and has spitefully taken the solution to her grave.  The mathematicians crash her shiva, determined to find that solution, even if it means tearing up the floorboards or desperately scrutinizing the mutterings of her African Grey parrot.  The following Q & A was generously provided for my use by Stuart's publisher, Penguin Books.  Enjoy--and, please, if you have the answers to one of life's riddles, please don't take it to your grave.  Your family thanks you.

Q:  Is this your first novel?  Could you talk about what inspired you to write this book?

Actually, this is my third novel.  I wrote my first when I was 20.  It was a comic picaresque a la Thomas Pynchon and it was so terrible that I knew I had to get out of the novel writing business and get a PhD. in science.  Then in my forties I wrote novel number two at the behest of my daughter, a comedy about a university led by a lunatic president.  It too was terrible, so terrible that I felt very happy that I’d gone into science all those years ago.  I tried again in my fifties.  I remembered an incident from when my daughter was three.  A well-known Eastern European émigré mathematician was at our house.  All dinner long he kept staring at my daughter.  Then after dinner, he berated me for not teaching my three-year-old algebra because he was convinced, somehow, that she was a math genius.  I thought about that incident many years later.  “What would it be like to be an Eastern European math genius?” I asked myself.  The result was The Mathematician’s Shiva.  It’s leaps and bounds better than my first two novels.  The third time was the charm.

Q:  You’re a PhD geophysicist, and Alexander “Sasha” Karnokovitch, the narrator of your novel, is an atmospheric scientist.  How did you come to fiction writing from a background in hard science?

I’ve always been a careful and serious reader of fiction, mostly Eastern European fiction and American fiction with strong European influences.  Off and on, I’ve written fiction for decades.  I wasn’t a talented writer, though.  Then in my fifties, I somehow developed what I thought was a unique voice.  I can’t explain how that happened.  It just did.

Q:  Your novel is about academics and academic life, subjects that are very popular in contemporary fiction.  Why do you think that these stories are so appealing, and why did you choose to write about academics yourself?

Academia is a closed setting, a small well-defined community.  In writing a novel, you need to focus on a group of people and the unit of an academic department or discipline is to my mind an ideal natural way to provide that focus.  I spent fifteen years as a professor.  I understand the academic mindset well.  Write about what you know, they say.

Q:  How much did you draw from your own experiences in writing this novel?

The novel has some autobiographical elements, certainly.  The opening is highly autobiographical, for example.  There is a scene where Rachela and her family go to a Russian cultural event and she tries, despite the inevitable tumult that will ensue, to get the Russian performers to defect.  This is something my mother did at least once a year.  But overall about eighty percent of the novel and the characters created come wholly from my imagination.

Q:  Though the novel revolves around the death of Rachela Karnokovitch—the narrator’s mother—and describes the difficulties of life in Eastern Europe under Stalinism, it’s also very funny.  How do you balance comedy and tragedy in your writing, and why do you feel that that’s important?

I think this approach to writing and life—dealing with tragedy through farce and acidic humor—is embedded in Eastern European culture and is especially embedded in Eastern European Jewish culture.  It was part of my day-to-day growing up.  My parents lived through so much horror in their early years that it would have been impossible and intolerable for them to confront it head on.  Comedy is how my family deals with tragedy almost always.  It softens the blow.  It’s usually an acceptable way to state displeasure and heartbreak over oppression.  I think this approach is probably fairly common with cultures that have been subject to cruelty and worse for centuries.

Q:  Rachela was a brilliant mathematician working in a difficult, male-dominated field.  Was her character inspired by anyone in your own life or from history?

I’ve had academic female friends who have told me in painful detail of their difficulties with male colleagues and male leadership in academia.  The playing field is not close to being level.  Sexual harassment is common.  Most feel that they cannot complain because it will be detrimental to their professional standing and note that those who do complain are vilified.  Then there is the problem that their work is slighted simply because they are female.  Those stories influenced my writing, certainly.  There was also the example of my mother, who in her later years ran construction crews and built a subdivision from scratch.  She, too, was in a male-dominated field (even more so than my female academic colleagues), but she had the advantage of having a huge personality and she had lived through WWII.  Nothing could intimidate her.  She could scare people, male and female, with her intensity.  I thought about what it would take to succeed in mathematics in the 1950s as a woman.  That person would have to be even more intimidating than my mother could be in the face of adversity and would have to be leagues smarter than any male in her field.  She’d have to be tall and disarmingly good-looking.  That’s how Rachela Karnokovitch was born.

Q:  History and memory play very important roles in your novel.  How did these forces affect you as you wrote the book?

I come from a family that had to flee their home because of war.  They didn’t come to America because they wanted to be here.  They came because they had no home left.  When your life and past are torn from you like that—when you don’t have even photographs to remind you of a life you view with fondness—you cherish your memories and live them again through narrative.  That’s what my father did, certainly.  He would tell stories about Europe and the war at our dining room table in broken English.  People would come to our house and listen.   My mother would serve cake and tea.  That would be something fairly typical for an evening’s entertainment in my home.  I can talk about great writers who have influenced me, but those stories of the past that my father used to tell Americans in our home—which were a mix of the real and completely fabricated—are the most significant influence on my writing.

Q:  What writers do you admire, and why?  How have they influenced your own writing?

Chekhov is at the top of the list because he had far more understanding about the intricacies of the human mind, heart and soul than anyone I’ve read and he could be articulate and plain spoken at the same time.  That’s what I aim for.  Then there is the mordantly comical approach of Gogol.  Recently I reread him after a forty-year hiatus and I was amazed by how close my writing was to his.  I cannot write without using comic elements.  Dickens always kept the plot front and center and wasn’t afraid to use emotions to drive a story; sometimes I need to be reminded of that to keep my own work from being too cold and erudite.  Mendele and Malamud looked at traditional Jewish life with both tenderness and acidic humor and both are never far from my mind when I write.

Q:  What do you love most about this book, and what do you hope that your readers will love about it?

It’s a book about how people can, through passion, hard work, and talent, overcome obstacles and still be aware of the irony that luck—both bad and good—plays a central role in their lives.  I hope readers will laugh out loud, cry now and then, and fall in love with the central characters, who are full of vitality and still maintain a positive, if somewhat gimlet-eyed, outlook despite the many tragedies they have endured.

Q:  What are you working on now?

A novel about a community of Holocaust survivors in the 1960s and 1970s, which has to deal with the American equivalent of a pogrom: a planned freeway that will tear their neighbourhood apart.  Right now, like The Mathematician’s Shiva, it’s a comedy.

An Autobiography in 21 Pieces

1.  Winter is my favorite season.  Deep drifts of snow, runny noses, the Sanskrit of small animals’ tracks across the crust of a snowbank, crackling flames in a fireplace, marshmallows bobbing in cocoa.  And, of course, hibernating with a long, dusty novel.  I am winter at the core of my being.  This was solidified back in the 80s when my mother was going through a Color Me Beautiful phase and we determined, through a professional analysis, that I was a Winter palette.  Wardrobe was re-arranged accordingly.

2.  My first failed novel was called Mrs. Winter and the Pool of Teeth, a thinly-disguised rip-off of Agatha Christie’s Miss Jane Marple.  In my book, amateur sleuth Mrs. Winter investigates a suspicious death at a Hollywood mansion where a legendary film actor died after falling into a swimming pool stocked with piranha.  I was 13 when I attempted to write this novel.  I wrote two chapters and abandoned it.  At the time, I thought it was the greatest thing I’d ever do in my life.  I might have been right about that.

3.  In my eighteenth summer, while hiking in Grand Teton National Park, I slipped into a stream and went over a waterfall.  In those 2.5 seconds of air time between the top of the falls and the rocks below, I believed I was dead.

4.  I grew up a preacher’s kid, so I had weekly doses of heaven and hell, death and eternal life.  Though my father’s sermons were no doubt interesting, I remember sitting in the pew, a hymnal open on my lap, filling in all the close-looped letters—d, b, a, o, p, q, e, g—with a small pencil.  When I finished with the letters, I started in on the musical notes.

5.  The first music I ever purchased with my own money was Captain and Tennille’s debut album, Love Will Keep Us Together.  Play any song of theirs today (besides the execrable “Muskrat Love”) and my nose will start to sting from foolish, nostalgic tears.

6.  You can know all you need to know about me by the music artists I have loved—truly, madly, deeply—during particular eras of my life:
     Jr. High/High School: The Captain and Tennille, Barry Manilow, Wild Cherry, KC and the Sunshine Band, The Cars, Nazareth, and the soundtracks to Star Wars, Grease, and Somewhere in Time.
     College: Emmylou Harris, Lou Ann Barton, Nicolette Larson, Linda Ronstadt, Rickie Lee Jones, The Beatles, Billy Joel, The Alan Parsons Project, Willie Nelson.
     1983-2008: Electric Light Orchestra, Maxi Priest, Sinead O’Connor, The Who, John Prine, Alanis Morrisette, 10,000 Maniacs, Sheryl Crow.
     Today: Mumford and Son, Cowboy Mouth, The Airborne Toxic Event, Patty Griffin, Sia, M83, Lorde.

7.  When I was four years old, I wanted to become a writer.  When I was six, I thought I’d be an astronaut someday.  Between the ages of ten and fourteen, after reading books by James Herriot, I made plans to become a veterinarian.  At fifteen, I returned to the original idea of becoming a published writer.  At fifteen-and-a-half, I switched careers and became an actor.

Stuck in the middle: The Little Foxes, 1982

8.  I started acting in community theater in 1976 when I was cast in the Jackson Hole Fine Arts Guild's production of The Music Man (Chorus/River City Kid) and continued to lay the groundwork for a Hollywood career with roles in Hello, Dolly! (Waiter #3), A Christmas Carol (Dick Wilkins), Inherit the Wind (Tom Davenport), That Championship Season (Tom Daley), The Little Foxes (Leo Hubbard), Chekhov’s The Bear (Grigory Stepanovitch Smirnov), Brigadoon (Angus MacGuffie) and The Rivals (Captain Jack Absolute).  When I enrolled at The University of Wyoming in 1981, I picked Theatre as my major.  I thought I was God’s gift to acting.  “Lord, what fools these mortals be!”

9.  In the fall of 1982, my best friend Randy and I drove from Laramie to Denver to an open cattle-call audition for Francis Ford Coppola’s adaptation of The Outsiders.  I wore a white T-shirt (silkscreened with James Dean’s head), blue jeans, and a leather jacket I’d borrowed from a fellow Theatre student.  Uncharacteristically, I’d slicked back my hair with gel.  I was Ponyboy through and through to the core.  I don’t remember my 90 seconds in the dim room in front of the casting directors, but though I imagine I thought I was pretty good, I’m sure I was pretty awful.  I never got a call-back.   When the film opened a year later, starring Tom Cruise, Matt Dillon and Diane Lane, I cried.  They were all so good and I had no business dreaming about joining them on the big screen.

10.  From 1979-1995—starting with A Little Romance and ending with Judge Dredd—I had a mad crush on Diane Lane.  A mad, mad, mad crush.  This crush was diminished, by necessity, once I got married.  Before that, however, I used to fantasize “accidental” meetings between the two of us: she pulls up in a car while I’m pumping gas, she and I are in the same line at the grocery store, she’s in town visiting her mother’s cousin who just happens to be the mother of my best friend.  That sort of foolishness.

11.  In my seventh summer, while riding my bike at furious speeds through an alley in Kittanning, Pennsylvania, I narrowly avoided being hit by a car when I burst out onto the cross-street.  I slammed on my brakes, the teenage driver slammed on his brakes, and I slid sideways in the gravel, coming to rest unharmed between the car’s front and back wheels.  To cover my embarrassment, I yelled at the kid still sitting behind the wheel, pale and shaking, “Why don’t you watch where you’re going?!”  I got up, brushed the pebbles out of my knees, and pedaled my now-wobbly bike home.

12.  Over the course of my 51 years, I’ve broken two bones in my body: my clavicle and my humerus.  However, a single organ—my heart—has been broken three times.  None of those has been at the hands of the woman who has been my wife for nearly 31 years.  The opposite, in fact.  We spent the first seven years mending each other’s heart from all the past relationships we survived.

13.  You can read about one of my broken-heart experiences on pages 197-201 of my novel Fobbit.  Pages 197-201 contain some of the most autobiographical fiction I’ve ever written.

14.  For a month during my eighteenth year of life, I thought I was in love with a married woman.  She’d been flirting with me and coming to my dorm room for extended (non-sexual) visits.  Her name was Cindy and, in looks, she reminded me of Sally Struthers (the All in the Family-era Sally Struthers, not the Feed the Children-era Sally Struthers).  Cindy flirted with me and I reciprocated.  I started to imagine myself as someone for whom a woman would ditch her marriage.  Cindy’s husband was a hockey player.  When I started to have nightmares of this man showing up at my dorm and beating me to death with a hockey stick, I stopped this foolishness.  I was not yet ready to die for the love of a woman.

15.  I am now ready to die for the woman I truly love, my wife.  I will step in front of the bullet, push her from the path of a speeding car, and stare down the sprinting grizzly bear if it means she will live another day.

16.  In truth, neither of us wants to die in place of the other.  Over the course of many discussions these past 31 years, we’ve agreed that, given the option, we will die together.  We will both remain in the car plunging over the 400-foot cliff, we will lock ourselves into our cabin as the ship goes down, we will politely ask the man pointing the gun to please kill us both at the same time.  Neither can bear the thought of living without the other.

17.  Though I fell in love with the girl who’d become my wife when I saw her for the first time singing in the choir loft at my father’s church, I think the moment our love really, truly solidified was on our honeymoon in Oregon when a seagull flew overhead and shat in her hair.

18.  When I was in my late 20s, I took up cross-stitching, joining my wife in the hobby.  We were already acting like the old married couple we’d later become.  After I got off work at the Army base and we had dinner and the kids were upstairs in their rooms playing with Legos or Star Wars action figures or Polly Pocket dolls or whatever it was they played with at the time, my wife and I each found a seat in our small living room, lamplight spilling across us and onto our stitcheries.  Some nights, it was so quiet, you could hear the poke of needle, the pull of thread and the snick of scissors.  Among other things, I embroidered a wedding sampler for my wife, a baby blanket for my daughter and a 5x7 landscape showing a church in the middle of a snowfield beneath a purple night sky.  I took unnatural, foolish pride in being a soldier who was an avid cross-stitcher.  On the nights when I pulled guard duty at our company headquarters, I made a big show about unpacking out my hoops, fabric, needle and thread box.  I didn’t care what my fellow soldiers thought.  I wanted to be different and I wanted them to notice.

19.  When I was 17, I wrote, produced, directed, and starred in a horror movie.  It was called Just a Scream Away and it was all about—spoiler alert!—a high school janitor who goes around killing the popular cheerleaders.  According to my high school French teacher who watched a rough cut of it one afternoon in her classroom, it was “the scariest movie ever made.”  Looking back, I think that either a) my French teacher was being patronizingly kind, or b) she had nerves as fragile as rice paper.

20.  While taking a class in ornithology at the University of Oregon, I ran over a killdeer nest with a tractor-mower.  My wife and I were managing a boat-and-trailer storage yard outside of Eugene and it was my responsibility to maintain the grassy strips between the storage sheds.  I was out one day, pulling the mower attachment behind a John Deere, when I felt a bump and a shriek.  I braked and looked behind me to see a mother killdeer trying to draw me in another direction using a “broken-wing ruse.”  I stopped the mower, climbed down from the tractor, and went back to investigate.  The ground was littered with feathers--small, downy feathers that drifted across the blood-smeared grass like snow.  I left the tractor where it was and walked back to the house on trembling legs, a bird screaming at me the whole way.  Though I soon recovered, at that one moment, I remember feeling like I should die for what I’d done.

"All I want for Christmas is a long and happy life.
Is that too much to ask?"

21.  In the winter of my eighteenth month of life, my mother took me out into the backyard of my father’s parsonage in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania to let me play in the snow while she hung laundry out to dry.  I was bundled in thick layers of a snowsuit and toddled around the yard, heading in the direction of my father’s church next door.  My mother took her eyes off me, concentrating on sheets and clothespins.  The next time she saw me, I was inching my way along the ledge above a stairwell that led to the church basement.  The stairwell was 10 feet deep, a set of concrete steps leading down to a door below.  My mother’s widening eyes saw everything in slow motion.  I had my back to the stairwell as I walked along the 7-inch-wide ledge.  I stopped.  My mother started to scream my name, but knew it was too late.  She saw the next three seconds play out in a slow-motion movie.  I decided to sit down.  But I sat down on air.  I was sucked out of my mother’s sight.  Her scream cut the cold air, fluttered the sheets hanging on the line; she was certain I was dead.  I lay at the bottom of the stairwell, gasping to regain the breath knocked out of me.  When I opened my eyes, I saw snowflakes coming my way, cascading through the air.  I thought they were tiny angels garbed in white robes sent with a message for me: “Not yet, not yet.”

Sunday Sentence: Three Years by Anton Chekhov

Simply put, the best sentence(s) I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.

“Your wife told me once in the summer that I should write a history play, and now I want to write and write; it seems I could just sit for three days and night, without getting up, and keep writing.  Images wear me out, they crowd in my head, and I feel as if my brain is pulsing.  I have no wish at all that something special should come from me, that I should create some great thing, I simply want to live, to dream, to hope, to keep up everywhere.”

Three Years by Anton Chekhov

On the Occasion of the Burial of Anton Chekhov

On this day in 1904, Anton Chekhov was buried in Moscow's Novodevichy Cemetery.  By all accounts, the event was closer to a circus than an interment.  The great Russian writer had died a week earlier at a German spa where he'd gone with his wife Olga in a last-ditch effort to stave off the tuberculosis which would eventually kill him at age 44.

A year ago, The Barnes and Noble Review's "Daybook" feature described the Chekhov funeral and it moved me so much I added a reminder on my calendar to mark the occasion here on the blog 365 days later:

      Maxim Gorky attended Chekhov’s funeral, and later described it as an outrage. His friend, “who squirmed at anything vile and vulgar,” had been transported from Germany in a refrigerated railcar marked, “For Oysters.” Part of the throng of mourners became confused by another funeral, that of an army general, and marched off to the strains of a military band. Among those who made it to the graveyard were many who “climbed trees and laughed, broke crosses and swore as they fought for a place. They asked loudly, 'Which is the wife? And the sister? Look, they're crying....” The family did not arrive until the procession was midway, and because students guarding the cortege didn't recognize them they had to force their way in.
      But others have commented that the funeral scene was entirely Chekhovian, a moment of tragicomedy to go with his legendary and poignant death.

Someday, I think I'll write a short story called "For Oysters" and the main character will be Chekhov's corpse decaying in the fishy stink of the funereal railcar traveling through Europe.

The definitive short story about Chekhov's demise has already been written, of course: "Errand" by Raymond Carver.

This piece of short fiction starts out as an atypical Carver story as it describes in quasi-documentary style Chekhov's illness and final days in Badenweiler, the German spa town.  Here's how Carver describes the last moments, after the doctor has concluded the end was near (he "knew the time could be reckoned in minutes") and has ordered a bottle of the hotel's best champagne:

Methodically, the way he did everything, the doctor went about the business of working the cork out of the bottle. He did it in such a way as to minimize, as much as possible, the festive explosion. He poured three glasses and, out of habit, pushed the cork back into the neck of the bottle. He then took the glasses of champagne over to the bed. Olga momentarily released her grip on Chekhov's hand--a hand, she said later, that burned her fingers. She arranged another pillow behind his head. Then she put the cool glass of champagne against Chekhov's palm and made sure his fingers closed around the stem. They exchanged looks--Chekhov, Olga, Dr. Schwohrer. They didn't touch glasses. There was no toast. What on earth was there to drink to? To death? Chekhov summoned his remaining strength and said, "It's been so long since I've had champagne." He brought the glass to his lips and drank. In a minute or two Olga took the empty glass from his hand and set it on the nightstand. Then Chekhov turned onto his side. He closed his eyes and sighed. A minute later, his breathing stopped.

You see?  Straight, barely-adorned biography (in Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life, Carol Sklenicka notes he'd recently read Henri Troyat's Chekhov and was unapologetically "cherry-picking episodes" from the French biography).  The very end of the story, the "errand" portion of the plot, is very Carverian, however, and he leaves us, as he so often does, in mid-stroke of the action.  In this case, a young waiter who has come to the Chekhov's hotel room after the writer's death reaches for the champagne cork which has fallen to the floor near his feet.

To retrieve it he would have to bend over, still gripping the vase. He would do this. He leaned over. Without looking down, he reached out and closed it into his hand.

We're left to ponder the significance of the action and to whom it matters most: the wild-haired waiter, the grief-stricken Olga, or perhaps Chekhov himself who, though his body has cooled, remains a presence in the story.  As always, Carver provides many avenues for us to choose as we exit the story.  It's the type of closure I think Anton Pavlovich would have appreciated.  Even if he does smell like oysters in the afterlife.

My Christmas Greed

When I was growing up, the big event of the holiday season was the arrival of the the Sears Christmas Wish Book.  Thick as a metropolitan phone book, the tissue-paper-thin pages were a virtual F.A.O. Schwartz for a kid living in rural Wyoming.  I remember grabbing the catalog soon after it arrived in October, sitting at the dining-room table with a ballpoint pen, and making large, paper-tearing X's next to the toys I wanted.

I never got any of those wished-for electronic racetracks, Spirographs, or Show 'N Tell Phono-Viewers, but I did treasure that Avon soap-on-a-rope I got annually from my grandmother.  And, Mom?  Those pumpkin-colored corduroy pants were pretty neat-o, too.

(In truth, I did get something I asked for one year: Romper Stompers.  Fans of the old TV show "Romper Room" will know what I'm talking about when I say that my fondest Christmas memory is walking [stomping] around the living room on upside-down yellow plastic cups while clutching green plastic "ropes" to hold the cups against my shoes.  You had to be there.)

As I grew older, my Christmas "wish books" grew a little more sophisticated.  While others of my gender couldn't wait to rip the protective plastic off their catalogs from Victoria's Secret or Eddie Bauer, I panted after the over-priced writerly delights of Levenger.  Once again, no one ever listened to my plea for a bamboo lap reader (with cup-holder), but still I prevailed.

So, now it's that time of year again--the season of dashed dreams.  To honor the occasion, I've come up with a small list of things I'd love to see under my tree.  Feel free to leave your Christmas wish lists in the comments section, and then send the link to your significant other.  You never know; contrary to what the Rolling Stones say, you might get what you want.

 Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy Deluxe Boxed Set

I might be one of the last people in the world to read these Swedish noir-mysteries, but they have been screaming from my wish list for more than a year now.  I already have a tattered paperback copy of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo on my bookshelf, but there's something beautiful about this boxed set that starts the drool flowing.

Tales of Chekhov

This 13-volume set from Ecco is a reissue of Constance Garnett's 1929 translation of more than 200 short stories and novellas from the Russian master.  Each volume is introduced by writers like Richard Ford, Susan Sontag, Harold Brodkey, Cynthia Ozick, and Russell Banks.  I've heard complaints of poor paper quality, but nevertheless, I want, I want, I want.

Preston Sturges--The Filmmaker Collection

For my money, there was no better writer in 1940s Hollywood than Preston Sturges.  He was so good, few audiences back then fully appreciated the bitter brilliance of Hail, the Conquering Hero and Sullivan's Travels and it took decades for true love to come Sturges' way.  He was long dead by then, of course.  But what he left for us is fan-frickin-tastic.  This collection of seven screwball classics is missing a major film of the Sturges canon--The Miracle of Morgan's Creek--but you'll be so busy laughing at the others here, you'll hardly noticed its absence.  Note to people shopping for me: I want to laugh this Christmas.

 Pride of Baghdad

This graphic novel by Brian K. Vaughn centers around one of the most fascinating side-stories of the Iraq War.  As Amazon describes it: "In the spring of 2003, a pride of lions escaped from the Baghdad zoo during an American bombing raid. Lost and confused, hungry but finally free, the four lions roamed the decimated streets of Baghdad in a desperate struggle for their lives. In documenting the plight of the lions, Pride of Baghdad raises questions about the true meaning of liberation – can it be given or is it earned only through self-determination and sacrifice? And in the end, is it truly better to die free than to live life in captivity?"  War and allegory--I can dig it, man.

M-Edge Go! Kindle Jacket

I'm not sure which Kindle cover I want, but I like the idea of being able to sit in bed with a small booklight glowing above the screen of my e-book.  My wife, dozing beside me, would certainly like that.  This, more than anything on this list, is probably what I'll end up with.  I've already been dropping atom-bomb-sized hints to Mrs. Abrams.

 Jean Arthur: The Actress Nobody Knew

Okay, I am just slightly obsessed with the squeaky-voiced Miss Arthur and I always get this big ole goofy grin on my face whenever she's on-screen in classics like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and The More the Merrier.  This biography by John Oller appears to be a very well-written account of a screwball lady who, like her contemporary Greta Garbo, closely guarded her private life.

 Dickens World

Anyone want to buy me a plane ticket to Jolly Old England?  On the surface, this amusement park based on the Victorian novelist's stories and characters may look like the ultimate in tacky entertainment, but in my opinion, any day spent fully immersed in Dickens is indeed the best of times, not the worst.  Besides, I really, really want to ride the Great Expectations log flume.

 Everything Else

Of course, there's also the usual assortment of Books of the Moment that I just cannot live without.  A partial list includes: Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart, Colonel Roosevelt by Edmund Morris, A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon, Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand, The Sherlockian by Graham Moore, Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro, The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer, The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman, Mr. Peanut by Adam Ross, Half a Life by Darin Strauss, The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udall, and The Tiger by John Vaillant.

Oh yeah, I guess I want peace on earth and goodwill to men, too.

Bruce Machart blazes onto the scene

It's always thrilling to find a first-time novelist who leaps out of the starting gate, hooves pounding and mane flying.  When you're a reviewer and you receive an advance copy of that book months before its publication date, you walk around with a smug expression, a know-it-all smile trembling at the corners of your mouth.  You can't wait for publication date to draw near so you can start telling others to go out and buy this great new book.

Ladies and gentlemen, I've been keeping this one close to my chest for nearly two months, but now I can finally share the joy.  Bruce Machart's debut novel, The Wake of Forgiveness, has arrived at your local bookstore and I urge you--if you are the least bit interested in quality literary fiction--to trot on down to your local independent book dealer (a big-box chain bookstore, if you must; or, if you insist, an on-line dealer) and get a copy.

Need more convincing?  You can read my review of the novel at The Barnes and Noble Review, which begins:

The Wake of Forgiveness, the rich, evocative debut novel by Bruce Machart, doesn't amble gently into a prolonged introduction of place and characters, but begins bang-on in the middle of a peak scene: a messy, fatal childbirth in the winter of 1895:

The blood had come hard from her, so much of it that, when Vaclav Skala awoke in wet bed linens to find her curled up against him on her side, moaning and glazed with sweat, rosary beads twisted around her clenched fingers, he smiled at the thought that she'd finally broken her water.

But, Machart continues, the birth was not an easy one: "When the baby arrived, their fourth boy, blood slicked and clot flecked, he appeared to have been as much ripped from flesh as born of it."

Likewise, this novel feels as if it was torn by a bare-handed surgeon from Machart's fecund imagination. Story and style writhe intertwined in a string of densely-packed sentences, the narrative itself taking on a bloody, clotted life of its own. Just a few paragraphs in and readers will find it hard to tamp down the urge to compare The Wake of Forgiveness to William Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy—two "go-to" authors lazy reviewers pull out of their shirt pocket when they want to telegraph blurb-ready assessments. Machart is one of the few contemporary writers worthy of that comparison, however. His labyrinthine sentences can run-on with the best of them.

But while The Wake of Forgiveness may unspool like another chapter from Faulkner's Snopes trilogy, and certainly has plenty of brutal McCarthian machismo pumping through its veins, Machart stakes his own territory in this engrossing novel which spans nearly thirty years in the troubled life of one south Texas family.

You can read the full review by clicking here.

In a Publishers Weekly profile, Machart listed his favorite authors as Andre Dubus, Tim O'Brien, Wallace Stegner, Richard Yates, Eudora Welty, Graham Greene, Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov.  You can tell a lot about a man by the company of books he keeps.

That precision of language and care of craft on display in the stories of Dubus, et al, are everywhere in Machart's first book.  He's a thoughtful writer, rarely given to excess (even though, on the surface, his sentences appear to be lush and filigreed with an abundance of words).

In an interview which accompanied the press materials I received with the advance reading copy The Wake of Forgiveness, Machart further elaborates on the theme I found so compelling:

I think I've come to understand--not fully, of course, but to a degree I hadn't before--how "motherless" children manage to live and mature and even flourish without somehow self-destructing along the way.  I was such a momma's boy as a kid, and I tend to write about characters who face situations that I can't imagine living through myself.  For me, even this question of the bond between sons and mothers can be chalked up to the importance of place.  Our mothers are not only the first people we know, but they are also the first "place" in which we live.  I was interested in exploring the emotional stakes for a boy becoming a man without ever having known his mother.  What I discovered is that even this emptiness is survivable, in part because the mother is always, to some extent, "in" the child, just as surely as the child originates in the mother.

First of all, I respect any man who can publicly admit he was a "momma's boy."  But I was also struck by what he said about characters facing situations he couldn't imagine experiencing himself.  This, of course, is the union card of writers.  When we're on top of our game, we're tour guides in foreign landscapes.

I was happy to discover recently that Machart is not a one-note wonder, that he more than lives up to that "thrilling promise" I mention in my review.  By complete coincidence, when I was shopping in the local Goodwill thrift store*, I came across a 20-volume set of Glimmer Train Stories** and in those back issues, I found a story written by Machart called "The Only Good Thing I've Heard."  The short story, which was published in the Fall 1998 issue, continues that theme of children and mothers by opening with this attention-getting sentence:  The baby had died inside her, and Tammy hadn't been out of bed in five days--not since the doctor induced labor that Saturday.  Tammy's husband, Raymond, is the central character of the story and, as a nurse in a hospital's burn unit, he's a good illustration of what Machart's talking about when he advises "write what you don't know."

To the best of my knowledge, Machart has never been a nurse, but--just as he does with the hard-bitten men in The Wake of Forgiveness--he slips seamlessly under Raymond's skin.  You get a very clear sense of what it's like to work in a burn unit, the professional detachment needed when helping doctors debride burned skin, as well as the heart-cracking compassion you inevitably feel for the patients in agony.  Take a look at these two paragraphs:

          Mrs. Lane's bottom lip was burned mostly away, and Raymond tried not to imagine it melting, dripping down onto her chin.  He was surprised she could still talk, but she spoke without squinting or slurring her words--without even the slightest sign of pain.  The day before, while Dr. Dutch and Nurse Taylor peeled the loose, burned skin from the old woman's chin with tweezers and scissors, scouring the raw flesh clean with a pad that looked like the one Tammy used on her baking dishes, Raymond had held the woman around the waist, keeping her bent above the whirlpool, whispering in her ear that it was almost over, as she screamed for them to stop.
          Hers had been the first debridement therapy of the day, and it was too much for him--the sight of bloody, singed flesh--and afterward he'd walked inconspicuously to the rest room and vomited.

Unfortunately, when I read "The Only Good Thing I've Heard," I happened to be eating breakfast: crisp bacon and slightly-runny eggs--not the kind of tactile reading experience you need first thing in the morning.  But when I was through, I was happy to have read the story, graphic scenes and all.  The patients in the burn unit--especially the young ones--churn Raymond's emotions as he simultaneously deals with his wife's miscarriage.  I guarantee you will not leave this story unshaken.

Machart will be releasing a collection of short stories, Men in the Making, on the heels of The Wake of Forgiveness sometime next year.  If this Glimmer Train story is any indication, that collection will further cement Machart's career--a future in writing which is no longer just a happy secret kept by us reviewers.


*It may not put coin in writers' pockets, but it is a fun place for bookhounds to explore and get treasures on the cheap.
**I'd regretfully let my subscription lapse during what my wife and I refer to as The Poverty Years, so it was cool to find these missing issues to add to my collection.

Author photo by Tessa Goth

Soup and Salad: Capote, Chekhov, Tinkers, Hugo

On today's menu:

1.  The 11-bedroom Brooklyn Heights mansion where tenant Truman Capote once hosted fabulous parties, thought up new ways to insult Gore Vidal, and wrote In Cold Blood (not necessarily in that order) is now on the market for a mere $18 million.  Buy it and you can forever boast you had breakfast at Truman's.

2.  Over at The Millions, Sonya Cheung holds Chekhov up to John Gardner's critical mirror in a mind-nudging essay: I Heart Chekhov; Better Than Booze or Smokes.  As Cheung notes, I read Chekhov repeatedly, in marathon sessions, story after story, for consolation and for a kind of cleansing out of both personal and writerly bullshit. I go to him not exactly for writing instruction, so much as to enlarge my writer’s vision; which is to say to deepen my capacity to see and feel more honestly.   As it so happens, I'm working my way through Chekhov's The Complete Short Novels and I'm enjoying my time wallowing in misery, despair, debt, and frigid cold.  (By weird happenstance, I'm also reading Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, so the two sometimes get muddled.)  I think I prefer Chekhov's short stories, but when I read passages like this from The Story of an Unknown Man, I feel cupped in the hands of a master:

At night I was cold, bored, and in pain, but by day I reveled in life--I can't think of a better expression.  The bright, hot sun beating in through the open windows and the balcony door, the shouts below, the splashing of oars, the ringing of bells, the rolling thunder of the cannon at noon, and the feeling of total, total freedom worked miracles with me; I felt strong wide wings at my sides, which carried me God knows where.

3.  Here's yet another account of the Cinderella story of Paul Harding's Tinkers, this year's Pulitzer-winner.  This is one of the first times I've actually read excerpts of the much-lauded prose quoted in the news article (Lightning crawled down the mountain and drank at the water, lapped at the shallows with electric tongues, stunning bolt-eye frogs and small trout and silver minnows).  Out of context, it seems a bit purple; but nevertheless, I cannot wait to get my hands on Tinkers and find out for myself if all the fuss is deserved.


4.  Francis McCue's The Car That Brought You Here Still Runs is another new release that's piqued my interest.  Using the poetry of Richard Hugo as a roadmap, McCue travels the backroads of Montana and the Pacific Northwest to discover, among other things, "Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg."  Since I moved to Butte, Montana, a year ago, I owe it to myself to get reacquainted with Hugo.  I'll do that as soon as I'm done with the Russians.  Read more about McCue's odyssey in this article from The Montana Standard.